"For to-night to the Hotel de l’Opera, where my sister is." I explained the position there, and then the change my brother’s death had caused, and that I was no longer to be known as Ferdinand Carbonnell, but as Lord Glisfoyle; that the next day our whole party would leave Madrid, and that she and Madame Chansette would leave with us. "You can stay if you please in Paris, or anywhere out of Spain, and for the purpose of the escape we must decide in what character you will travel. That’s as far as I’ve got with our plans, but no one will look for you in Mrs. Curwen’s rooms at the hotel." "I will not promise to leave Madrid," she said, firmly. "Just as you please. No doubt Quesada can find a cell for each of us if we remain," I returned, pointedly. "If you stay, I stay, Sarita: on that I take my oath." Without waiting for a reply, I told her rapidly so much of what had occurred since I had seen her as I deemed necessary: the quarrel with Livenza, the interview with Quesada, my discovery of his connivance in the Carlist plot, and that I had faced him with it, and then the scene at Quesada’s house that evening; and I was at great pains to make it as clear as I could that all the Minister’s plans were laid well in advance to deal this overwhelming blow at the Carlists, when the King had once been put away. Told as the story was now, with all the evidence of police activity in full sight, and broken by more than one pause, as we had to stand aside to avoid the rush of the howling mob as some party of prisoners was dragged past us, it carried conviction. "This is no chance work of an hour, Sarita. The plans have been ready and the preparations made for days past, merely waiting the signal. The very warrants under which these men and women here are being imprisoned have been lying ready signed in the pigeon-holes of Quesada’s office, and the lists have been made out with scrupulous deliberation and method. This was the reception he had in readiness for the friends by whose deed he meant to climb. Success or failure was all one to him. If the plot had succeeded, he would have crushed you Carlists, to leave no one in his path; it has failed, and he can still use it to consolidate his power and strengthen his influence as a jealous Minister of the King. His treachery is the only true thing in him."